Critical Linking: January 11, 2015

Literary treasures from around the world feature in the first of a series of postcard collections from Oxford’s Bodleian Library. From the slaying of a unicorn in a medieval English Bestiary to the incarnation of an 18th-century Thai Buddha, each image is chosen to represent a letter of the alphabet.

I like the trend of seeing more intersex, transgender, and genderqueer or nonbinary characters, as well as some characters of color. I do wish there was more genre fiction, and it could be that there are books coming out with major or minor incidentally LGBTQ characters. I think we still need coming out stories or novels in which sexuality does play a central theme, but also LGBTQ teens who have other problems, whether they are everyday, paranormal, mysterious, fantastical, or whatever. There should be as many types of novels about these characters as there are about straight ones.